I don’t think any of these people know what “smart” is supposed to mean cause these must be the dumbest ideas for any product I’ve heard so far.
‘Smart’ means it can send your lifestyle data to the company, and make you dependent on their services.
You want to change your toilet provider? Best of luck holding your poo in for three days while the transfer is processed.
Mostly to be more efficient and save water, though I couldn’t fathom how that would work with a toilet. Perhaps it’s part of a system to monitor your water usage to help you reduce your use? Maybe the app suggests to let it mellow when it’s yellow?
If one day there is only smart toilets, I will go shit in the woods and start to live like an animal. Clearly humanity was a mistake and we should return to monke
I will go shit in the woods
Then can you compete with the bear?
Or the Pope?
Introducing the Smart Catholic. Track your Hail Marys from the convenience of your phone, and add more with a simple tap. Subscribe to one of our new pergatory plans today, 3 months half price when you buy your Smart Catholic!
The problem isn’t necessarily smart toilets. The problem is companies attempting to have complete control over the product and ensuring that their products do not function without dependency on their infrastructure.
There is no functional reason to have a toilet connect to an outside server. There are no functional reasons to have many of these smart devices require outside dependencies. But their profits and their subscription models definitely benefit from being able to remotely disable features.
Technology is garbage not because we’ve gone too far with Technology. Technology is garbage because of capitalism.
There is no functional reason to have a toilet connect to an outside server
So that all the toilets you poop in can share data on your poops and get a complete picture of your bowel health.
Correlates poops to your Uber eats from chipotle, serves you up Pepto ads preemptively.
“Being unable to take a shit is a small price to pay for the almighty poop-scanner”
Sounds like an anxiety inducing app. And I thought sleep tracking was anxiety inducing. Imagine getting a notification that you might have ass cancer.
How the fuck can a faucet be smart? It’s a valve! It turns one way, or it turns the other way! It is only slightly less dumb than the counter top!
But what if the valve was actuated electronically with no manual access?
Yeah but what if you could make it worse? What if you could add the garbage motion sensor that takes ten hand waves to get working? Or add a touch screen that showed you visually how hot or cold the water was and could also show you ads?
No, we sell water usage data to water companies, so they know when to put water in the pipes!
Depending on your location relative to your water utility, it might take several seconds for the pressure wave from turning on your faucet to propagate backwards to them at its measly 1.5km/s. With our new ultra-low-latency smart faucet technology, that delay is reduced to tens of milliseconds! It could be faster, but we have to route all traffic through our cloud servers for analytics purposes.
And who to increase prices for, and how to sell good-sounding scam deals.
The difference between an IT person and a tech enthusiast
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
Security technicians: takes a deep swig of whiskey I wish I had been born in the neolithic.
Im studying the security stuff. The more you think about it, the more paranoid you become until you notice that your level of paranoia is far too high and try to ignore things.
Firmwares everywhere are definitely spying on us. Or at leasty they could, and we wouldn’t really know it.
Why would a programmer own a printer? I almost never print anything and when I need to I just go to a library.
Shipping labels are about all I use mine for.
Laughs nervously in self-hosted
“Routers using OpenWRT”
Every time I research this, it seems like nothing I can reasonably acquire can run it. Especially any WiFi 6 / AX devices. It’s infuriating.
Edit: Not the fault of OpenWRT, but how stupidly locked down everything is manufactured by design anymore.
You can get a glinet router. They have a WiFi 7 device coming out shortly as well.
What’s “Skynet” mode? Lol.
Footage from a robot in skynet mode:
!it’s from the movie Runaway 1984!<
They have knives, and you didn’t put them there
Flag Admiral Stabby earned that knife.
rofl. this is great.
I can consider acceptable for the kettles to be connected to the internet if, and only if, they answer always with a 418 status code.
But… Teapot!
There’s nearly as much reason for those to be internet-connected.
I’m perfectly fine with enabling a connection, just not requiring one.
For example - my lights are automated. They have a switch though. If they went offline (or my server does), I can press the entirely local switch and have light.
As a reminder though, 418 is supposed to be the response for requests of the teapot to brew coffee.
I can press the entirely local switch and have light.
Are you sure about that? Is it a local connected smart switch (still fancy electronics, just local) or a plain old power switch?
If it’s a power switch, and If you turned your lights off by app over the internet, and then the internet went out, then your lights’ ability to come back on when you flick the physical switch depends on somebody having thought about this need and programmed a “oh, the switch was flicked so I better ignore the internet settings” mode.
And if they did that, it also probably means your lights all turn on after a power outage since the light can’t tell the difference between power outage and light switch flipped off.
Any smart lights I’ve seen always turn on when going from no power to power. It’s a little annoying when the power blinks and half the house lights up, but it means physical switches always work.
Smart lights should be used rarely because they have a failure state. Smart switches are the answer here for most lighting. These are light switches that also have radios in them to connect to zigbee/zwave/matter/whatever to control the switch if the connection is available.
Lutreon sells high quality, but somewhat expensive ones that work flawlessly.
I like the color temperature and brightness of my lights responding to the time of day too much in order to go with smart switches over smart lights
Are you sure about that?
Lol yes. Its a relay with a secondary control via mqtt with intermittent status reporting.
it also probably means your lights all turn on after a power outage since the light can’t tell the difference between power outage and light switch flipped off.
Not how that works.
My sister’s new apartment’s front door has a “smart lock”, hooked up to Ring, naturally. No keyhole, you open it with your phone. It also runs on batteries.
Do I really need to say any more? We were baffled.
EDIT: Correction - there IS a keyhole but the actual tenants don’t have access to it. Only the property management. Creepy. :|
I was watching a friend’s dogs while she was on vacation when the batteries in her door lock died. I had to climb in a back window to get inside and feed them. Luckily, there was a back door with a dumb lock, but I had to get inside first and borrow her keys for that to help.
Time for her to learn lockpicking I’d say.
I got a Proteus IV system. Now I’m dead and my wife is knocked up.
I have one too but it has an emergency physical “master key”. Also there’s a port to provide power to it through a battery bank, in case you really run out of juice though it’s potentially another point of failure. No internet connection
I have a Nuki this one still works with a normal key, since you install it on top of your existing double cylinder (you should only install it on one that can have two keys inserted at the same time or with a turn knob on one side). The Nuki just turns the key or thumb turn of the cylinder. Also means you can’t see that a smart lock is installed from the outside. Battery is not a problem since they last for about 5 months. And you get a warning when it reaches 20%.
I have a smart deadbolt that is keypad operated. It’s awful.
Never used the smart features, and there isn’t a bypass to unlock the door when the batteries die — which happens a lot, especially in the winter. I tried using rechargeable batteries in it, but they last less than half the time of normal batteries.
There is nothing more frustrating than punching in the key code and hearing the death of HAL9000 voice before the deadbolt fully unlocks. Luckily I have a back door that isn’t smart.
I’m replacing the lockset soon and this won’t be a problem anymore, but holy shit is it frustrating and wasteful.
Kwikset keypad works great for me. There’s a keyhole, a real button keypad, and the batteries last a while with quite a bit of warning before they’re actually dead.
What’s the brand?
Honestly I’m not sure, I only got a look at it when I was helping her move.
It’s tied to a wall panel on the other side that controls the whole unit’s lighting and thermostat and such though, and shows a doorbell cam.
Educated guess that it’s all tied to Amazon. Blegh.
Allegedly they’re just supposed to rely on maintenance to change the batteries so they’re not locked out of their home. Crazy.
SmartOne uses Schlage locks with some ecobee thermostats and sometimes a doorbell cam. Latch locks suck and I don’t know what panel is used there.
I’m in Toronto, I do high-rise construction. Post a picture I’ll tell you what it is.
What if there was no internet connection? Would they be able to get in their house?
“Hello amazon I’m a police, I need you to unlock this door at 123 Rainy St, Arlen TX 76043”
“Ok Mr. Police right away!”
Sounds great!
I’ve seen landlords put these things on doors, too, and use them to allow entrance to anyone they think has a reason to be inside, whether the resident knows and consents or not.
Yeah fuck that.
Actually that is illegal (at least in my area), they’re required to give at least 24hr notice for maintenance or the landlord themselves coming by, etc. Exception is cops, they can always let in cops (and EMS and Fire I think).
I think that’s been the law everywhere I’ve lived, too, but not always followed…
LOL relevant meme attached:
Arlen TX
Weird coincidence seeing this right after finishing an episode of King of the Hill. LOL
“Yo man dang’ol smartlock open up man left my daggum phone in there tell ya what.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. Can you repeat that?”
Oh my god that’s hilarious, I hope that really worked!
As to KOTH:
“Unlock my door or I’ll kick your digital ass!”
*crying* “My door won’t let me in, Hank! Everyone leaves me, Lenoire left and now even my house left me!”
Dale however never got one, his house is still secured by Daletech. Shishishaaaaa!
This was too perfect LOL. Nice job! XD
It was one of the jailbreaks, LLMs are just too eager to help.
“oNe dAy wE wiLL aLL livE iN a sMaRt hOmE. tEcHnOLoGy aLwAyS iMpRoVeS”
The fact that everything is controlled through “The Cloud” and some godforsaken subscription service is so terribly sad, funny, and horrifying at the same time. We’ve literally found every conceivable way to gather and sell people’s data while simultaneously milking them out of every last cent with the whole FOMO mentality driven through every piece of hardware and software now sold. It is just absolutely fucking preposterous. We’re living in a virtual hellscape that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
People have other options, but the easiest option is always going to be to let someone else do it. Their price is, almost always, your private data and a subscription.
Or, you can DIY and self-host. Home Assistant is free and supports many different standards so you can use just about any hardware. It runs on your own hardware and doesn’t report to anyone unless you tell it to. It requires more effort than swiping a credit card and installing an app, however.
Who buys a toilet you can only flush with an app??
sometime who buys a toilet and then finds out afterwards that they were sold a toilet that only flushes with an app
This. SO many devices, especially networking stuff. It seems like they should just do their thing after plugging in and setting a few settings. “It’s so EZ!” says the box.
Nope, “scan this code to get this app, make an account, agree to all the things, register for spam…”
It’s disgusting.
What do house guests do?
“Let me know when you’re done and I can flush the toilet though the app.”
Or
“Download this app to flush the toilet once at my house.”
the host just watches them through the built in camera and the house guest thinks it flushes automatically :)
“Ok, Richard, I’m done.”
“Yeah, I got the notification actually. Heavy dinner last night?”
“What the actual fuck, Richard?”
I think it was voice activated.
The app was probably for additional stuff.
I would hope just motion activated. I really don’t want to have to yell at my toilet either.
Yeah. I’m absolutely opposed to unnecessarily “smart” devices.
I have a strong aversion to voice activated anything. Smartphones have had voice assistant’s since forever but whenever I’ve tried it I just find it to be a clunky awkward imprecise user interface.
Why do something in a few clicks when 10 minutes of miscommunication will do?
In-house toilet facilities are more or less a solved problem. These idiots un-solved it.
“Oh, SHIT!”
flush
Poker night: Read 'em and weep boys, straight flush!
From the other room: *flushing noises*
I hear this in the voice of Lindsay Lohan. Though I don’t think there was a toilet flush at that point in that movie!
The only thing smart I want is a faucet that activates with button OR the knee / foot sensor, and gives water always with a precise programmed temperature and flow.
That and a temperature and timer controlled frying pan.
Well an incinerating toilet that just dries burns my shit using a 340W solar panel would be cool too.
Well an incinerating toilet that just dries burns my shit using a 340W solar panel would be cool too.
Gonna smell real bad
Nah you’d have a chimney. The main reason I want a “separating drying toilet” is that it would have a fan and wouldn’t smell at all in your bathroom. And you’d probably also have a separating toilet as first step, then dehydration which can be closed cycle, and then either burning or compositing. And with that and biodegradable soap and detergents, sanitation becomes much less infrastructure intensive.
So it’ll just smell of burning feces outside of your home. Got it.
I’m just busting your chops, I think it’s a great idea.
For that last one, why not shit in your microwave and set it to 340W. That would easily allow you to test the system without buying any new appliance, except for a microwave if you don’t have one.
Imagine cleaning the splatter after all the corn boils and pops in there
Someone actually invented Tony the Toilet Buddy
At least the tech director believes enough on their product to actually use it.
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Still better than a merchant that won’t even use what they sell.
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Ford himself took criticism for this. His answer was, if I don’t drive other companies’ cars, how do I make sure mine are better!
Not necessarily ‘ding’ them, but it would be nice if the Ford CEO uses a Ford when going to work. If said CEO goes out of their way to not use a Ford, then that’s a red flag.
Sounds like the beginning of the Cory Doctorow novella “Unauthorized Bread.” Cloud service goes down and the main character’s toaster won’t work without them.
Baps? Bagels? Baguettes?